At 17:46 +0000 2003-12-26, Christopher John Fynn wrote:
(Though the Roman style & Fraktur style of Latin script are probably more
different from each other as some of the separately encoded Indic scripts [e.g. Kannada / Telugu])
Sorry, Chris, this is unsubstantiated speculation, and it doesn't happen to be true.
In 1997, I showed some comparisons between Coptic, Greek, Cyrillic, and Gothic showing that all of them but Greek were similar enough to be read with a minimum of training and practice. I revised this a bit in 2001: http://www.evertype.com/standards/cy/coptic.html. German, English, and Irish can all be read with similarly low learning curve whether the script is Fraktur or Gaelic; the number of letterforms which differ is small. Wedding invitations in English-speaking countries are routinely written in non-Latin garb. the identification is uncontested! No student of writing systems classes the "Gaelic script" as something different from "Latin script". The same cannot be said of Phoenician, Samaritan, and Hebrew, for instance.
FWIW, nobody needed to teach me to read Fraktur or Gaelic. I could make sense of them pretty much on my own, and after working out the oddities could/can read them with fair facility and speed. I was looking at some Samaritan samples that someone sent me over the weekend, and although I can read Hebrew, reading the Samaritan was extremely tough going. I had to look up letter-shapes in the tables several times, and even when I had some of them learned, it was still very much sounding out the words, or thinking letter-letter-letter and putting together the more familiar letters in my head to get a word. The language itself wasn't that unfamiliar; much of it was Biblical quotes, some of which I knew by heart; other text was fairly normal Hebrew and Aramaic.
In fairness, kids in school are taught specially to read Rashi script, though it's not such a chore. Only a few of the letters are really drastically different from what they're used to, and my son says he could read it before the class had really gone through the stuff from his Rashi book.
~mark
